Tag: Kintbury

Once a mountain

Walbury Beacon Benefice is named after the point on Walbury Hill where, traditionally, a beacon has been built.

But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.

Thomas Hardy, “On Wessex Heights“

Walbury Beacon Benefice is named after the point on Walbury Hill where, traditionally, a beacon has been built. Originally beacons were lit across the south of England as an alert to the danger of invasion. More recently and at least since Victorian times, the chain of beacons has been lit to celebrate royal jubilees. Sometimes known as Inkpen Beacon, at 974 feet above sea level, Walbury Hill is the highest point on chalk in England and the site of Walbury Camp, an Iron Age hill fort, which, I believe, has never been excavated.

A beacon on Walbury Hill/Inkpen Beacon celebrating the Platinum Jubilee in June 2022

It will surprise some people to know that when the Ordnance Survey first surveyed this area, Walbury Hill was measured as being 1,011 feet above sea level, thus making it a mountain! However, a subsequent survey in the late C19th measured Walbury at less than 975 feet and so demoted it to the status of a hill.

Further westward along the ridge is Inkpen Long Barrow, one of only three long barrows in Berkshire but one of a cluster, most of which are located in Wiltshire and Dorset. However, it is not the long barrow that many visitors come to see, but the famous (or perhaps that should be infamous) Combe Gibbet.

Combe gibbet

Many people mistakenly believe that a gibbet was the site of a public execution, but this was not so. The original Combe Gibbet was only used once but it was not for an execution. In 1676, George Broomham and Dorothy Newman were convicted of the murder of George’s wife Martha and son, Robert. They were executed at Winchester but their bodies returned to their home parishes where they were hung on the gibbet – as a deterrent to anyone contemplating committing murder. What contributes to the general confusion between a gibbet and a gallows is the fact that the downland on the north side below the gibbet is marked on OS maps as “Gallows Down” – presumably a misnomer which has stuck!

As many of you will know, the story of Broomham and Newman inspired the then young Oxford graduate John Schlessinger, to make his first feature film, “The Black Legend”. In the late 1940s the Schlessinger family lived at Mount Pleasant, between Inkpen and Kintbury  and so the grisly local landmark would have been a familiar sight to them. With family members and friends from Oxford taking the major roles, John Schlessinger filmed the story of murder during the summer of 1948, using many local people as extras. I doubt any of these villagers had the remotest idea that this young man would one day go on to be one of Britain’s foremost directors winning 7 BAFTAs and an Oscar.

Nearly 20 years later John Schlessinger was to return to Wessex to film his adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd”. Filmed entirely on location in Wiltshire and Dorset, what fascinates me about this later work are the number of scenes which recall moments from Schlessinger’s earlier film. It is as if the inspiration he took from his work around Walbury Hill stayed with him and was used in this, one of the visually most beautiful of British films.

However, it is not only because of the Black Legend that many other people visit Walbury Hill. The Newbury Weekly News archive features various accounts of visits to the area or discussions of its history. Some time in the late C19th, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy visited Walbury Beacon – though perhaps to confuse us even more, he calls it “Ingpen Beacon” – and referenced it in his poem, Wessex Heights:

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

Walbury Hill might not be a mountain but it remains a much loved landmark.

Theresa Lock

Olive Emma Witt

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s Church, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker.

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker. Rather than being stone, as are the great majority of grave markers, this one, standing little over three feet high, is of metal, probably tin, and enclosed in a five-sided wooden frame. From a distance it looks a little like a larger version of a Victorian schoolchild’s slate; perhaps this was deliberate , because the person commemorated was  six year old Olive Emma Witt, who died in 1896.

Olive Emma Witt’s grave marker in Kintbury church yard

The Witts were not originally of Kintbury. Olive’s father, Tom, had been born in 1846 at Braemore, Hampshire, where his father, Charles had been an agricultural labourer. Emma Witt had been born in Salisbury in 1850.

At the time of the 1871 census, Tom was working as a gardener in Salisbury and it has to be likely that it was around this time that he met Emma Skeet, the local girl who would become his wife.

By 1881, the Witts had moved north out of Wiltshire to west Berkshire where Tom now worked as a gardener at Elcot. The family had grown: Walter had been born in 1877 and Herbert in 1880.

It would seem that Tom Witt was an ambitious young man – by the census of 1891 he is a farm bailiff at Inlease Farm on the Hungerford Road out of Kintbury where they have been living for at least six years now. Two more children had been born: Charles in 1885 and Olive in 1890. The household must have been a busy and possibly crowded one as the Witts had four young men lodgers: two carters and two ploughboys, all working on the farm.

Some time within the following six years, Tom progressed from being a bailiff at Inlease to a farmer in his own right at Cullamores Farm on the road out of Kintbury towards Inkpen. Very sadly, however, it was here that, on June 10th, 1896, little Olive died. The grieving family put an announcement in the Newbury Weekly News.

The census of 1901 shows Tom & Emma still at Cullamores with Tom described as an “Employer”. The distinction between “Employed” and “Employer” was particularly significant in an age of increasing social mobility, particularly for someone like Tom whose father had been an agricultural labourer like so many thousands of men in the middle of the century. Tom & Emma were coming up in the world.

Herbert, now 20, was working on the farm. Charles, however, had turned his back on farming and at 16 was a carpenter’s apprentice. Walter had left Kintbury altogether, and was now a police constable at Rochester Row Police Station in London.

The end of the nineteenth century saw decreasing numbers of workers employed in agriculture and this national trend seems to have been reflected in the family experience of the Witts. By 1911, Walter was married with a daughter and living in Harrow, Middlesex. He was still with the Metropolitan Police. Herbert, who had previously been working on the family farm, had followed his elder brother into the police force, but for him a force not so far from home as he was in Wantage.

By 1911, Tom was 64 and no longer working in agriculture and no longer himself an employer. Furthermore, he and Emma have left Kintbury and were now living in Newland, Cogges, close to Witney in Oxfordshire. He has returned to his first occupation, that of gardener and on the census is identified as a “worker”.  

The trajectory of Tom Witt’s life experiences would have mirrored those of many of his contemporaries. Born into an agricultural labourer’s family, Tom had improved his life chances becoming upwardly mobile until he could describe himself as a farmer and employer – a distinction which mattered in this ultra class conscious time. By the time Tom and Emma’s sons had been born, universal education would have given them a far better start in life than that experienced by their grandfather Witt in Hampshire, enabling them to join the police force and ensuring their place in the lower middle classes.

We do not know exactly why Tom & Emma left Cullamores farm but it has to be likely that the slump in agriculture had something to do with it. This was a time when many thousands were still leaving the countryside for the growing towns whilst others were emigrating overseas. For Tom & Emma, perhaps the move northwards to Witney was a fresh start away from the world – and the social status – they had lost.

I wonder if they ever returned to Kintbury and to the little grave in St Mary’s churchyard -the journey back then from Witney would have required three changes of train on the Great Western Railway. The forty mile journey across the downs by road would have been slow and unlikely to be completed easily within a day.

Why Olive’s grave marker was of tin rather than stone I do not know. Iron crosses are not unknown in churchyards but a grave marker of tin is something I have seen nowhere else.

But then, any exploration of family history – any family – raises far more questions than it ever answers.

Tessa Lock

In the time of the Romans

Imagine our area over sixteen hundred years ago in the fourth century AD. For three hundred years the country has been ruled as part of the Roman Empire and the local Celtic tribe, the Atrebates, now have a good working relationship with the incomers.

Imagine our area over sixteen hundred years ago in the fourth century AD. For three hundred years the country has been ruled as part of the Roman Empire and the local Celtic tribe, the Atrebates, now have a good working relationship with the incomers.

The regional centre is at Calleva Atrebatum (modern Silchester) – a town in the traditional Roman style but with a name reflecting the presence of the Iron Age people who were here first. Out here to the west, our area is close to the main route from Calleva to Aquae Sulis (modern day Bath) where the hot springs are an attraction to visitors. The route passes through the settlement of Spinis, which today we know as Speen.

For those living closer to this major road, the ranks of Roman soldiers, their helmets and shields glistening in the pale sunlight, have been a familiar sight. The men are not all from Rome, of course – far from it. The Roman army recruit from all over the Empire – across Europe and even North Africa. Sometimes local men from the indigenous Celtic tribes have signed up too, attracted to the idea of gaining Roman citizenship with all its advantages if you were able to complete a long period of military service, as well as the chance to travel and see the world.

Those who have travelled beyond our valley, or have spoken to others who have done so, speak of towns where the buildings are of stone with heating actually under the floor, where there is drainage and streets paved so that you are not deep in mud as soon as you leave your dwelling. This is the Roman way, and it all sounds very attractive and modern.

Indeed, some local people are wanting a piece of this new, improved lifestyle for themselves. There has been talk of local, Celtic women who have, despite family opposition, married young Roman men. Perhaps they have been attracted by the striking uniform or the offer of a more comfortable home. Who knows. But you do not have to marry into a Roman family to adopt this new way of living. Wealthier Celts have been increasingly adopting Roman ways.

Although there were no major Roman towns in our immediate area, we know that  those who were influenced by Roman ways did live in our valley. These people may have been exclusively of Roman descent, although it is more likely that they were Romano-British and therefore of possible mixed heritage or of Celtic descent but influenced by Roman ways.

Between 1950 and 1951, a teacher from St Barts Grammar School, Douglas Connah, led an excavation of a site which had been uncovered following work at the sewage works to the east of Kintbury. The excavation revealed the rectangular ground plan of a fourth century bath house, unfortunately badly damaged by ploughing and robbing out of much of its stone.

The building measured 5.25m by 4.04m with an extension to the south. At the east end was evidence of a praefurium, or furnace, to facilitate heating via a hypocaust which had been cut into the natural chalk and was still, at the time of the excavation, covered by a layer of wood ash. The building had been constructed of large flints and the lower courses of sarsen stone.

Painted plaster remains, now in West Berks Museum, indicated that the walls of the building were originally decorated whilst several tesserae suggested that there had once been a mosaic floor. It was possible to date the building to the fourth century due to pottery and a fibula brooch found in a rubbish pit nearby.

A tessera found near Irish Hill, outside of Kintbury

Although the bath house, as excavated, appeared not to have been joined to another building, it would not have been built in isolation but as part of a villa complex. It could have been on the site of a prosperous farm or indeed at the centre of a large estate. We may never know. But it is clear that sixteen hundred years ago, someone from around here wanted to build a modern, fashionable house with the latest in painted walls and mosaic flooring, and, of course, central heating.

It is sad for us that the remains of the accompanying villa have long been destroyed, most likely when the canal was constructed in the early 19th century. What happened to the broken remains of the roof tiles, the wall plaster, the tesserae? Who knows, keeping a sharp eye open when you’re walking towards Hamstead Marshall from Kintbury, you just might spot something of interest.

Tessa Lock